(Issue 4; posted March 21, 1997; archived April 4, 1997)

Never mind the news and shock value in that cloned sheep named after Dolly Parton: What Ian Wilmut really gave the press last month was a chance to make bad puns.

"Will there be another you?" read the cover of Time (beneath the faces of two sheep), leaving readers to grasp the double entendre. "We will see ewe again," read a title inside. The Los Angeles Times headed one of its boxes "Ewe 2."

The event also gave science reporters a rare opportunity to use a term they ordinarily avoid: breakthrough. Biotechnologists had transgressed a boundary; so, evidently, could they.

A wire service rewrite in the Detroit Free Press was typical: "Scottish researchers have broken one of nature's greatest taboos by cloning a lamb from a single cell of an adult animal, a breakthrough that opens the door to the possibility of cloning humans." A startling lead, but who could argue its accuracy?

Beyond widespread use of the B-word, the press behaved as it usually does. Readers could find whatever they wanted - sci-fi hysteria or reasoned discourse - depending on the publication they chose to read.

Resoundingly, the flagship periodicals got the story right on both counts - science and ethics - even as scientists and ethicists were still struggling over the implications. In the New York Times, Gina Kolata began a second-day story with several columns on the ethics. She quoted a cell biologist remarking that men are now unnecessary, but continued "on a more serious note," observing that "people are more than just the sum of their genes" and that an embryo clone would grow up in a much different environment than its adult-cell progenitor. The Times followed a few days later with more than two full pages about the science, including a lengthy history of Wilmut's research.

To a quick dispatch from Scotland, the Los Angeles Times added a lengthy and intelligent Q & A about the science by veteran science writer Thomas Maugh III, as well as a piece on the ethics by medical writer Terence Monmaney. The latter began by quoting two identical twins who have no qualms that cloning threatens human identity. (Many ethicists would argue with them: No one knew the twins' phenotype at birth, or took steps to copy them. Monmaney did not point this out.) Like many others, Monmaney did note that somatic mutations and other environmental factors would muddle the "identicalness" of an adult cell donor and his cloned offspring, and that a population of clones might be vulnerable to epidemics.

Both major newsweeklies featured the story on their March 10 covers. Newsweek chose a photo of babies in beakers; Time showed those two ewes. Typically, Newsweek's coverage was the more sober, and Time's far more quirky and facile.

Time chose to interview celebrities about cloning ("One Imelda Marcos is probably enough," says Imelda Marcos) and ran an essay by its social Darwinist Robert Wright, as well as a real science fiction short story, alongside a standard science feature that got the right points across about the science and the ethics. The main article observed that science may not be "able to clear the ethical high bar" to get human cloning going. Time also set up a Web site for further reading.

For Business Week, the occasion offered the chance to run an information-rich special section that it had in the hopper, featuring pieces on the business of biotechnology, the implications of genetic developments and many other related subjects, flanking a lead article on cloning. For my money, Business Week's readers got the most informative coverage of all.

As for the tabloids, it was a perfect excuse to emulate the National Enquirer. "A startling step toward a science fiction world," gasped the New York Post - one that left "many Americans . . . scared witless." In its coverage of the next-day story - the primate embryos cloned in Oregon - the Post gave more inches of space to quotes from startled New Yorkers than to the event itself.

Nearly everyone (except some of the tabloids) caught the nugget of the scientific advance - the de-differentiation of adult cells - as well as the important distinction between sheep cloned from an adult cell and monkeys (reportedly) cloned from embryos. Nearly everyone also raised the important scientific and moral caveats. Uniformly, the major news publications favored sober analysis to hype or hysteria.

Despite the inevitable allusions to Hitler and Frankenstein, most articles pointed out the positive potential of the experiment, for drug production in transgenic animals, for instance, or for generating tissues for transplant. Many also pointed out that other (probably simpler) methods already existed for these purposes.

However, there are some interesting gaps. No one I read bothered to make the important but confusing distinction between embryonic cloning and cloning as the term is used in molecular genetics (is it time to reconsider the semantics?). There was rarely a mention of the October 1993 flap after two Georgetown University researchers split a few human embryos created in vitro. At the time, ethicist George Annas called that "the experiment we were never going to do." And though many reports pointed out that Dolly was the only success among 277 attempts, no one at all suggested a possibility that Wilmut himself hinted at in Nature - that her cell parent might have been an incompletely differentiated mammary cell - nor the fact that she cannot be utterly (pardon me) identical to that cell because the ewe that bore her contributed some mitochondrial DNA.

How did the story get into the press before the report appeared in Nature? The genealogy of the news leak is uncertain, but it seems to trace to an Italian newspaper that broke Nature's embargo by a few days, after seeing the journal's press release. Reuters and the London Observer followed suit, and then Nature lifted the embargo.

This was the subject of much discussion on the National Association of Science Writers Internet site. Members reminded each other that it was (as freelance and former sysop Bill Thomasson put it) "merely the latest step in a story that goes back more than a quarter century." They launched into a quick rivalry for authorship of the earliest story on the topic. Someone claimed precedent for predicting in print back in 1959 that "in 1998 or thereabouts" the first commercial product of animal engineering would be achieved in Scotland: recombinant haggis.

Given a science story of this magnitude, sprung on scientists as surely as it was on the press, it would be hard to find a benchmark against which to judge the reporting. One might look back to Hiroshima, after which Time quickly reported that "in an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future." (This parallel with The Bomb is mine; I never saw it in the press.) In the months after Hiroshima, many articles in the popular press predicted that splitting the atom would lead to an effort-free society with lots of leisure time, and even to world peace.

The cloning was a surprise, but it is not an "instant" new future - and most reporters said so. Also, readers are far different today. Shortly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seven in ten Americans told pollsters they thought the bombings were a good thing. This month, a Time/CNN poll found that seven in ten Americans find human cloning "downright scary" and nine in ten would not clone themselves. (But note: One in ten would!)

This development is not a bomb; it is a wedge. Everyone has time to deliberate about it - years and years, more than likely. It might even give us all a kick in the pants to resolve more pressing issues such as the hazards of gene testing or the privacy of medical records.

There may be plenty to think about now, but fortunately anyone who wants to do so can easily learn the facts. The most interesting part will be the rest of the story.

Lois Wingerson has written about biomedical science for 25 years, for newspapers and magazines including New Scientist, the Economist, and the New York Times. She is the author of Mapping Our Genes (Penguin USA, 1990).

Endlinks

The University of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics has a bioethics links site. It includes links on philosophy, on political issues such as experimentation on prisoners, to journals and organizations, and much more.

Embracing Change with All Four Arms: A Post-Humanist Defense of Genetic Engineering "defend[s] human genetic engineering with a new bioethical approach . . . combined with a radical democratic political framework."

In this current issue of HMS Beagle, contributor Alan P. Wolffe discusses the science of mammalian cloning on his Op-Ed piece, Mammalian Cloning: The Science Of the Lambs. In our last issue, John Maddox wrote on The Non-Ethics of Cloning. And Robert Finn critiqued publishing embargoes in The Scientist, the Journalist, the Journal, and the Embargo.

Planet Science, the New Scientist's fascinating and very useful Webzine, has a section entitled Cloning: A Special Report which includes original articles and editorials, plus a "bumper crop of links" and a bioethics forum with many intelligent opinions about the implications of Dolly (you can post to the forum).

Biospace provides numerous editorials and articles from a variety of sources (mostly general media) about Dolly. The information is updated daily and also includes items from the previous several days.

Microsoft's Slate features four articles:

• Human Clones: Why Not? by Nathan Myhrvad. "Opposition to cloning isn't just Luddism - it's racism."
• Sheep Thrills: How Dolly Was Designed by Andrew Berry
• Multiplicity :Cloning, Nature, and Nurture by David Berreby
• Hitler the philanthropist, clone your wife, and other tales from a week of media clone madness. A Newt in every home? by William Saletan

Enter The Fray, Slate's discussion area, where there is a lively interchange on sheep cloning. There are 200+ postings on the subject ranging from "cloning . . . a way to lower the high price of lamb chops" (message 210) to "bioethics and you . . . and you" (message 200) - registration required. Or start a discussion in BioMedNet with your biomedical colleagues.